Tag: Morality

“But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days….evil men and impostors will proceed from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived.” (2 Timothy 3:1, 3:13)

So wrote St. Paul to Timothy regarding the trajectory of human society.

Notice that St. Paul does not write about wars and explosive catastrophes. These epic events are so beloved by the charismatics who see signs of doom in their morning cornflakes, but they are not mentioned here. Indeed, the scripture writers show remarkable disinterest in providing us with a historical timeline of events regarding what will happen in the future. The apostles are not in the business of equipping us to be professional fortune-tellers.

This has not stopped many people – including good and faithful Christians – looking for current events in the word of God. Nuclear Armageddons, world wars, missile strikes by Iran, and imminent biological threats have each, at different times, been “unearthed” in the scriptures. Some claim that certain symbols in the Book of Daniel or The Revelation speak of Hitler. Or the Pope. Or the President of the United States.

This has always been a temptation for Christians. For example, in 14th century Europe amidst the ravages of the Black Death that killed approximately half of the continent’s population, Christians “discovered” that the scriptures predicted disease and the end of the world in their times. “It must be so,” they reasoned, “for if the horsemen of the apocalypse do not refer to times like ours, then what could they possibly refer to?” The same questions have been asked whenever great evil befalls the human race.

But this is not the sort of information the scriptures offer us about the Last Days. We may be thankful God does not paint out the future for us in lurid journalistic detail, for who could bear the weight of it?

Yet this does not mean the Bible offers us no information at all. In this letter, St. Paul provides us with extremely valuable information. But observe where the apostle’s focus lies; take careful note of what is important in the estimation of the apostle.

For St. Paul is chiefly interested in the moral dimension of the Last Days. If you want to know how close the Lord is, says St. Paul, look at the moral fabric around you and compare it to what has gone before, both in degree and intensity. Look at sin’s prevalence and acceptance. To paraphrase Christopher Wren, “if you want to see a monument that shows us how close we are to the end of days, then look around you”.

For it is precisely the moral context of any age or epoch that shows us mankind’s alienation from God and our proximity to Christ’s return.

Some have argued that St. Paul must be describing all time since Christ’s ascension. They argue this on the basis that all of these sins have always been common to mankind in every era. You could always find greedy people. Or disobedient children.

But the Apostle’s own writing here would tend to suggest he was thinking of a definite future point. He clearly says that these terrible times will come. He does not say that terrible times have already come – even against the backdrop of bloody assassinations of emperors in Rome and the deplorable morality of a pagan people. Rather he says terrible times will come and they will come just prior to the Lord’s return.

What will make the last days terrible? St. Paul answers, “The moral quality of the people”.

During the Last Days we will see sins that are not merely on the charts, but are so extreme, so intense, so common that they will exceed the charts of human depravity. St. Paul writes about people loving money and lacking self-control. Being lovers of pleasure more than lovers of God. He speaks of rebellion against parents and ingratitude. He writes about men being conceited and brutal. He paints a compendium of immorality. St. Paul pictures a society in shocking decay, where life becomes precarious, evil becomes the main survival strategy, and goodness carries a great personal cost.

Moral evil, St. Paul points out, will intensify as human society endures. Each succeeding generation will outdo its predecessor in unbelief and in sin.

Thus, what constituted a love of money in the early 1900’s – for example, the Roaring Twenties and the tragic greed for shares that ruined countless lives – may change in form. It may be expressed differently on the surface. Yet the underlying love of money continues and will become all the more severe as time goes on.

If the Global Financial Crisis proved anything it was the existence of epic greed on a scale never witnessed before in human history. Moreover, this was not just limited to a few wealthy fat cats. Large masses of people were so indebted nothing they had was really theirs. And still the lesson has not been learned! Already, so soon after the alleged “recovery,” once again we see large masses of people up to their neck in debt.

In Australia, the ME Bank issues a bi-annual report on the condition of Australian households. It surveys 1,500 households regarding income, expenditure, saving, and financial stress. The most recent findings show that no moral wisdom has been gained from the global financial downturn. It shows that people no longer even abide by common proverbial wisdom and “save for a rainy day”. Instead, people live close to disaster and ruin. So close, indeed, that it would terrify our frugal forebears:

The report showed that households’ confidence to raise money for an emergency dropped three points below the average since the survey began, and fewer households reported they are saving. The estimated amount that Australians are saving each month decreased by just over 10% during the first half of 2018.

More Australians are also overspending – households who ‘typically spend all of their income and more’ increased 3 points to 11% during the six months to June.

“Clearly, this is a potential tipping point. At the moment, Australians generally can dip into their savings to get by. However, some households may get to a point where there’s no more savings to draw from. Currently, around a quarter of Australian households have less than $1000 in cash savings,” Oughton said.

This is not just an Australian phenomenon. This year it was reported in The Independent that a quarter of British adults have no savings at all:

…the poll of 2,620 respondents in the UK found more than a tenth of the population admit to being ‘terrible’ with money.

Also concerning is the fact one in 10 admitted they typically spend more than they earn.

And 28 per cent sometimes go over budget.

Additionally, the study also found one in 10 adults over the age of 55 don’t have a penny put away for their future – compared to 38 per cent of 25 to 34 year-olds who are already saving.

Of course there are cases where people experience financial disaster due to no fault of their own. Such people are deserving of compassion and support.

But one of the leaders of the financial group that commissioned the report could not help but point to the self-inflicted nature of the situation. It is not that many of these Britons do not earn money. It is simply that they are unable to control themselves.

They cannot govern their own impulses. And so they spend.

“But our results found people are more prone to splurging money on things they don’t need, rather than saving it and it’s this that has the greatest impact.”

…

And more than one in 10 admit they often spend their money as soon as they get it.

In the last month, fifteen per cent of respondents have spent money on cigarettes, and 58 per cent have bought chocolate or sweets.

Four in 10 have splashed the cash on a takeaway, with 45 per cent opting for one at least once a month.

Lovers of money are frequently impoverished.

But self-control is evaporating right across the landscape of human experience, not just in the realm of money. St. Paul taught us that as we approach the last days we should expect to see an explosion in the number of people who are unable to control themselves. We should expect to observe a general loss in the ability of people to restrain their appetites; to discipline their desires; to be governed by the mind and not by transient emotions and lusts.

To an unprecedented degree we see this very problem emerging at a galloping pace in Western culture. Self-control is fast diminishing.

A hundred years ago people would have associated drunkenness and violence with a lack of self-control. But a lack of self-control was much less of an issue in a society that used corporal and capital punishments; had high expectations of personal behaviour; and demanded people take full responsibility for their actions. Nobody thought to excuse their bad behaviour on the grounds of a difficult upbringing, or one’s parents, or society at large. Nobody would have taken it seriously. Moreover, overall there were far fewer opportunities for people to truly lose control of themselves. Western society still had a Christian backbone and regarded personal morality as a public matter.

Yes, there were infamous Victorian brothels or gin joints that offered people some scope for their sinful impulses. Morphine addiction might have been enjoyed by wealthier men – as Sherlock Holmes was famously portrayed as using by Arthur Conan Doyle. A person might be able to be violent in the family home and rule it like a malignant tyrant. But the censure of polite society was heavy. Drunks were reviled. Wife-beaters were held in contempt. And sexual impurity was so scandalous it could ruin career and reputation (not to mention body and mind should one contract a sexually transmitted disease).

All such intemperance was held to be shameful and was denounced by top-hatted leaders as evident evils.

But as society has grown more affluent it has also grown more lax in the policing of morality. Opportunities for people to behave without inhibition continue to expand, just as St. Paul predicted. Sin has intensified because it has gained traction, popularity, and social approval. Sin is also aided by technology. Technology can be a great blessing. Discoveries and inventions of all kinds have been ordained by the grace of God so that the human race can expand and truly “fill the earth”. Unfortunately, in the hands of sinful men and women, technology also provides the means for the promotion of sin.

One realm in which we see this vividly is in modern entertainment.

New forms of entertainment now focus deliberately and calculatedly on tacky, sleazy, and childish aspects of uninhibited conduct. Their much-ballyhooed “stars” are encouraged to be aggressive, dirty mouthed, oddball, and blatantly sexualised. Reality television shows like Love Island even try to give promiscuity a certain glamour. Its contestants consist of scantily clad men and women who are thrown together into intimate situations, with the crackle of sexual expectation constantly underpinning conversations, choices, and behaviour.

Love Island displays camera footage of contestants in bed together. Contrary to all notions of moral purity, unmarried contestants sleep together in the same bed. They are filmed as they engage in intimate caressing and stroking. In recent episode a male contestant was shown running his hands over a female contestant’s buttocks, hips and body as they lay in bed together. A day later, the female contestant who had been fondled told the camera team that she needed time to warm up and therefore “nothing risky happened”. She added that the male contestant she was in bed with “was keen”, as if this were a striking flash of insight.

Unmarried sex is portrayed as normal and exciting across entertainment platforms. In movies, television shows, and video games audiences are seldom shown examples of noble self-restraint and honourable conduct because virtue is not the goal. It certainly is not the goal of reality television. This is because moral conduct is insufferably boring to a society that neither fears God nor cares about their personal accountability before him on the Day of Judgement.

God has promised that his wrath is upon the sexually immoral. Yet this is a trivial matter to most people in the Western world who have been successfully deceived into thinking that there is no God (or if there is, he is a liberal, jovial Santa Claus-type figure who will never punish and never condemn). Most people now believe that we are not created beings. They ascribe human beings some place in the world of animals. This downgrade in human dignity supposedly permits behaviour that even the beasts do not engage in. Most of Western society now thinks there is no absolute moral law that is binding on the human conscience. They laugh at the Final Judgement.

It is hard to believe that it was only a hundred and twenty years ago, in 1896, that the first on-screen kiss was filmed and shown as a Vitascope movie aptly titled The Kiss. This short movie, less than 30 seconds long, simply showed a middle-aged man and woman kissing each other. Despite its tame content by 21st century standards, the film resulted in moral disgust both from the media and from churches. Several years later, another short kissing film was actually censored by theatres.

A hundred and twenty years later the moral quality of entertainment has plummeted to depths the average person could not ever have imagined in the 1890’s. Film now includes nude sex scenes of all kinds; full frontal nakedness; casual sexualised language; not to mention gratuitous violence in which human beings are bloodily hacked apart for horrific effect; and a fascination with dark spirits, demonic activity, and re-animated corpses.

Yet, it will not end here, of course. The development of 3D virtual reality systems opens new frontiers. Entertainment system builders are scrambling over themselves to combine sex with new technology.

For those who do not know virtual reality technology involves a user wearing a headset that contains high-definition projectors or screens that can simulate an alternative world. The user can interact with the simulation to different degrees as he turns his head, or motions with his hands, or walks around. The technology is designed to simulate an “alternative reality” to an extent that traditional screens cannot.

Phone or television screens show images in a defined frame. The frame is the screen itself. A television screen, for example, usually has a black plastic border around it. A mobile phone screen is edged by the shell of the phone casing. In both cases, the screen has a measurable surface; a beginning and an end. These sorts of screens exist within a real environment. For example, the family television in a living room shares the environment with furnishings, ornaments, windows, floors, and people. With little effort, you can lift your eyes from the moving images on the screen and look at something that is real.

Virtual reality headsets, on the other hand, are meant to be fully immersive. They are designed to block out as much of the real environment as possible and replace it with a simulation that is as realistic as possible. The illusion is heightened by allowing the user to interact with the simulated world; by giving him some degree of control over what he sees. The aim is to create a bubble of fantasy that approximates to real life.

An article published in September 2017 in Asia Times documents the eagerness with which sexual content is now combined with new entertainment products:

“Every time a new technology is introduced into the market, adult content always tends to be the new technology’s earliest and most eager adopters,” Hahn said. “This happened in the past [with technologies] like VHS, DVD and Blu-ray, and is now happening on VR.”

According to Google trending analysis, people search for VR porn far more than for VR games and sports. Currently, around 38% of VR headsets are purchased by people who want to enjoy adult content, while 3% of all VR users pay an average of US$35 for adult content.

By 2025, the VR adult-entertainment business will be worth an estimated $1 billion, third-largest in the VR sector after video games ($1.4 billion) and content related to America’s National Football League ($1.23 billion), Hahn said.

The effort and energy that is now being expended to expand the boundaries of sexual sin is staggering. The full pornography experience includes virtual reality headsets, gadgets that produce scents, and devices that are attached to the genitals. It is a grotesque technological monster that aims to give a person the nearest approximation of sexual activity without actually involving another person:

To create lifelike intimate sexual experiences in the virtual world requires a combination of visual, sensual and intellectual components, which is made possible with gadgets such as VR headsets, scents emitted from the device, and synched vibration of intimate parts.

“To fully gear up for VR sex now requires at least US$10,000. That’s a very expensive [sexual experience],” Hahn said.

Michelle Flynn, director and owner of Lightsouthern Cinema, who has more than 10 years of experience in the adult-entertainment industry, expressed excitement at the new technology.

“VR porn provides more realistic experiences and greater immersion,” Flynn said. “Instead of being a spectator, you become a participant. It is so immersive that when the performer leans into the camera when you are watching, you move your head back too.”

What moral “progress” has been wrought by the entertainment industry since the Vitascope kissing film of 1896!

Another measurable demonstration of St. Paul’s principle is seen in the way people eat.

Food requires self-control. This is necessary both in the selection of food that is eaten and in the actual amount consumed. In the past, people could seldom overeat. They could indulge only at certain points in time which were almost always tied to a communal celebration. Harvest festivals, religious days, or wedding ceremonies would be observed with feasts and banqueting. Sometimes these could continue for many days. Yet, outside of these times, people’s eating was limited by several unavoidable forces that acted as restraints.

The first was the imperative to perform daily manual work which was often time-consuming. The second force was the natural limitations on food production and storage in pre-industrial societies that made economy a necessary virtue for survival. In other words, a person could not regularly overeat because too much of their time was spent in work, and food was rationed so that it lasted for the period between harvests.

In the modern Western world no such limits exist anymore and the result has been an explosion in sloth, obesity, and people who destroy their own health with food. Neither is such a lack of self-restraint isolated only to Western nations. Sin is, after all, universal. And if the West has a cultural backbone of Christian virtue, other historically non-Christian nations have no such heritage and are even less resistant to sin.

Thus, food-related diseases are rapidly appearing in the Third World. There are obesity epidemics occurring in places traditionally associated with hunger, like India. In fact, there is now a 5% morbid obesity rate in India and it is rapidly galloping upward. In a country of nearly a billion people, this translates to fifty million overweight people with millions more growing obese by the year. But South Africa leaves them in the shade. In 2015, around 65% of its population were obese.

It was relatively difficult for most people to be obese a hundred years ago, and because of this historical fact, obesity is often explained away as a government problem, or the effect of technological development, or as a by-product of the industrialisation of labour. Like many human problems, obesity is seldom examined as a moral problem. Seldom is obesity even seen to have a moral dimension – for that would require personal responsibility – even though our eating is unquestionably governed by moral choices.

Television shows like TLC’s My 600 lb Life reveals the morality behind eating. It documents the lives of people who have reached gargantuan proportions. These people never deny themselves food. They consume far more than is necessary. In all cases, they will easily eat in one sitting as much food as a family of six might comfortably share between them. Moreover, as the television series investigates their lives, their personalities come to the forefront. Even under the scrutiny of the cameras, what is often revealed is selfishness, laziness, self-pity, and a habit of bullying and blaming others. One of the ways in which these ugly moral lapses work their way out is through gluttony.

Some of these people reach the point of immobility before they decide to change. The solution they hit upon is surgery. Of course, the assumption behind weight-loss surgery is an absence of self-control for the rest of a person’s life. Since these people cannot control themselves, an artificial constraint must be placed upon them by literally cutting away their stomach or using gastric bands to squeeze it.

The latest development in the loss of self-control is the emergence of movements that seek to redefine what is healthy. Like other forms of identity politics, the basis for doing this is not empirical science but an ideological fantasy.

The “body positivity” or “size acceptance” movement is now at the forefront of enabling people to delude themselves that they can be “healthy at any size”. This is a movement that quite openly aims to overturn the concept that slender bodies are beautiful, and it particularly attacks the idea that some people are more beautiful than others. “Every human body deserves to be celebrated regardless of size,” they say. Thus, fat people should be able to wear what they like. There should be fashion models of different degrees of obesity. Fat people should “feel comfortable in their own skin”. You can have “beauty at any size”. These are the keystone slogans.

The body positivity movement has very quickly morphed itself into a victim group. This demonstrates something of the psychology of identity politics and the complete intellectual anaemia of Western culture that such a thing could be taken seriously. In a world that still knows starvation, the absurdity of overweight people claiming to be victims, or the risible notion that someone is “brave” for being overweight and wearing a bikini in public, demonstrates how bottomless is the pit of irrationality.

Despite the foolishness of their assertions the body positivity movement has learned the lessons of identity politics very well. It understands how to pull the levers of manipulation and the importance of enlisting the liberal media to their cause. Almost lock, stock and barrel, it has copied its strategy from other successful identity movements. This is why it is experiencing unqualified support in the liberal media. It can also command an army of outrage like other identity groups. One need only consider the fury over Netflix’s new series Insatiable to see this in action.

Body positivity advocates have dressed themselves in the garb of oppression. They claim to have been bullied at school for their weight thus demonstrating the systemic discrimination against fat people, no different from the “hate” experienced by other victim groups. They point to slender models in advertising and claim this is dangerous. It is dangerous, they say, because it teaches young women to starve themselves and hate their own bodies. “This kind of advertising,” they assert without evidence, “is harming young women. It is telling every teenage girl, ‘You are not good enough’.”

The body positivity movement has invented terms like “body shaming” or “fat shaming”, which are roughly congruent with terms like “victim shaming”. These terms are so construed as to encompass any criticism of obesity or any negative opinion whatsoever about a person’s appearance. This extends even to common and logical associations such as the relationship between obesity and inactivity.

Activists in this movement, many of whom are obese women, will appear on cameras and insist that obesity is merely the normal state of their particular body. They will often claim that they perform extensive physical activity and eat healthily – as was the case of one advocate who weighed over 300 pounds and visibly struggled to fit into the studio chairs. These claims are flatly biologically impossible. Nobody who eats a mostly vegetarian diet and performs extensive daily physical exercise would possibly be able to approach 140 kilograms. Yet the obvious lie – so clearly contradictory of objective reality – is seldom allowed to be challenged without shrieks of “insensitivity” and “body shaming”.

Other key concepts in the movement include “structural discrimination”. This relates to the alleged oppression inherent in an environment that is not designed for people of their girth. For example, seats in an aircraft are frequently too small for overweight people. Doorways may be too narrow. Aisles in some stores may not be navigated comfortably by mobility scooters. Rides in amusement parks may exclude people over a weight category. Some surfaces may crack or break when walked upon.

None of this is interpreted as a sign that a person has become so overweight that they have exceeded the spectrum of sizes for which the built environment was designed. Rather it is interpreted as a subtle form of discrimination. Builders, designers, architects, and engineers are constructing the world for the slender and thereby marginalising and excluding the obese. This is presented as being similar to the now infamous “microaggressions” that have become sources of tremendous concern to college students.

The ultimate aim for the body positivity movement to enrol these concepts into the pantheon of public virtue. They want to force the world to accommodate them. Aircraft will need to provide them with broader seats for the same price of an airfare as someone who might be given a smaller seat. Stores should be mobility scooter friendly. All clothing lines should come in gargantuan sizes. And “body shaming” should become so politically incorrect and dangerous that eventually it is regarded as “sackable” evil. Some progress has already been made toward the goal with the banning of the “Are you beach body ready?” advertisements in the London Underground. These advertisements showed a fit woman and were decried as unrealistic and exclusionary.

Taken to its logical extension – and given the ever-expanding waistlines of citizens in the Western world – it will eventually become very difficult for any health advice about obesity to be issued to people.

If there is one thing that definitively marks Western culture in the last few decades – and will continue to mark Western culture into the foreseeable future – it is the development of sophisticated frameworks to deflect personal responsibility for the choices and problems in one’s life upon others. A smoker, for example, will blame tobacco companies for their cancer. Or the government, because it once allowed tobacconists to advertise their products. The liberal press will try to exculpate the poor for quite literally burning up their precious money on cigarettes. And now a whole movement has come into being that not only celebrates overweight people under the guise of “acceptance”, but actually encourages obesity by trying to suppress inconvenient information or bullying people into silence who would appeal to the verdict of medical science.

St. Paul foresaw this many centuries ago. If he were to visit us in the 21st century, none of this would have surprised him, and it should not surprise us that this sort of delusion will continue to increase. Western society is bound to get sicker, fatter, more economically precarious, more sexualised, more obsessed with pornography, more perverted, and ever more thoroughly riddled with other forms of evil.

St. Paul’s warning to Timothy enables us to make predictions about the direction society is heading. Of course, the Lord can – and frequently has – radically altered the course of history to fulfil his plans. Nothing of the future can be known for certain, other than what God himself has chosen to reveal to us. And, as human creatures, we lack our God’s perfect omniscience and must never fancy ourselves wiser than our Maker. Yet thanks to his word, we are able to see something of the future unfolding before us.

As the days grow darker and immorality and vice more omnipresent, we can find our consolation in the certainty that the Lord’s return is growing closer. God will not allow the darkness to long envelope the world, for he is a God of light and justice. It is an exciting thought that our Lord may descend upon the clouds in the very near future.

“The hour has already come for you to wake up from your slumber, because our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed.” (Romans 13:11)

Voltaire famously observed that if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.

In the letter written in verse Épître à l’Auteur du Livre des Trois Imposteurs, Voltaire addresses the secularist who desires to abolish God:

But you, faulty logician, whose sad foolishness,
Dares to reassure them in the path of crime,
What fruit do you expect to reap from your fine arguments?
Will your children be more obedient to your voice?
Your friends, at time of need, more useful and reliable?
Your wife more honest? And your new renter,
For not believing in God, will he pay you better?
Alas! let’s leave intact human belief in fear and hope.

In these pithy and energetic lines, Voltaire argues that an absence of faith in God does nothing to enhance the moral quality of either society or the individual relationships that make it up. To the contrary. Voltaire claims that the moral condition of society would decay. Without hesitation he lays at the feet of the secularist (the “faulty logician”) the moral culpability for the disintegration of familial harmony, fiscal honesty, and even spousal fidelity. Any man who desires to rid the masses of faith in God, implies Voltaire, is essentially encouraging them down a path of crime, both petty and criminal.

Voltaire was, of course, a deist, not an outright atheist despite the New Atheists often seeking to claim him as one of their own. His views, therefore, are typical of the popular deism of his time. Deists saw value of faith primarily in its the utilitarian value, and this attitude is certainly reflected in Voltaire’s epistle.

Over and over, Voltaire argues that with no God to obey, and thus no inward conscience to speak to a man about his duties toward others, no matter how bad the man might be now, he will be all the worse for God’s absence. Widespread belief in God, whomever that God might be (deists tended to be more agnostic on that score; Voltaire himself admired Hinduism), must be regarded as a social good by the mere virtue that faith in God serves to elevate man’s conduct.

He goes on to argue:

My lodging is filled with lizards and rats;
But the architect exists, and anyone who denies it,
Is touched with madness under the guise of wisdom.
Consult Zoroaster, and Minos, and Solon,
And the martyr Socrates, and the great Cicero:
They all adored a master, a judge, a father.
This sublime system is necessary to man.
It is the sacred tie that binds society,
The first foundation of holy equity,
The bridle to the wicked, the hope of the just.

The national fabric (and even religions themselves) may be pockmarked with rogues and evildoers – the “lizards and rats” – but the Architect of the system exists nonetheless. Voltaire points out that the greatest thinkers, most significant reformers, and the best legislators of history each recognised the importance a “sublime system” to forward the enlightenment of society. Cicero and the others would have taken extreme umbrage with the New Atheists who argue that religion darkens society.

God is necessary, says Voltaire, because faith in him accomplishes two important tasks. First, it serves to reign in wickedness, and secondly, it serves to provide courage and motivation to those who want justice to prevail. Faith in God has driven the most profound reforms in history, from Wilberforce’s emancipation of slaves in the British Empire, to Amy Carmichael’s struggle against child temple prostitution in India, to the prosecution of war criminals following the Second World War. Most of the greatest charities have been founded by principled, deeply religious people. Thus, faith in God is doubly positive for society.

The first task – putting a brake on criminality – is self-evidently worthwhile and good, because it results in less evil. The second task of faith is not as obvious, but just as vital. Indeed, it may even be more vital than the first. People need reasons to believe in justice; they need to have grounds for hope so that they can transform their moral environment for the better. Faith in God provides that impetus.

Voltaire builds on this theme more in a subsequent verse:

If the heavens, stripped of his noble imprint,
Could ever cease to attest to his being,If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.
Let the wise man announce him and kings fear him.
Kings, if you oppress me, if your eminences disdain,
The tears of the innocent that you cause to flow,
My avenger is in the heavens: learn to tremble.
Such, at least, is the fruit of a useful creed.

God is the refuge of the powerless, says Voltaire. When tyrants oppress their weaker fellow creatures, God is the ultimate source of consolation. Where else may a man go? In what else may he trust when confronted with human weakness, evil, hostility, persecution, or aggression? What other hope does the oppressed and dispossessed have, except that his injustice will be avenged by the divine Judge? When a man has nothing, he can at least avoid total spiritual breakdown in the sure knowledge that his tears contain inherent value in the eyes of his Creator.

History illustrates Voltaire’s observation rendered in flesh. Myriad are the stories of oppressed people finding their solace in God, from the Hebrew slaves who cried out to God to deliver them from Egypt, to St. Paul singing hymns in prison. Or the slaves on the cotton plantations, beaten mercilessly and worked on the end of a lash for sixteen hours of the day or more. Had they sought their hope in the material world alone they might have succumbed to abject despair. Or the men and women starving in German concentration camps, surrounded by death and barbarity. These might have been brutalised beyond recovery if not for trusting in the final justice and redemption God would surely bring upon their tormentors, in both this world and the world to come.

For these reasons (and others), Voltaire argues that God is so fundamental and necessary to human existence that should humankind ever find itself without deity above them, they would soon have to create a simulacrum of God just to fill the gaping void. Looking back over the bloodiest century in human history, an age of atheism, Darwinism, and the generalised corrosion of faith, one cannot help see considerable prescience in Voltaire’s observations. From beginning to end of the last century, history has witnessed ideologies venerated like religious creeds; political parties proclaimed as infallible products of destiny; and political leaders elevated to the status of demigods.

Throughout it all, armies of humanists, secularists and atheists have tried hard to promote the idea that God is unnecessary and faith is toxic. Richard Dawkins has ascribed faith the properties of being dangerous and suggested that religious institutions do wicked things to people’s minds (how those institutions should be deemed “wicked” in a godless universe where one man’s principles are not objectively better than another’s, is anyone’s guess). Christopher Hitchens frequently spoke about his discomfort with the idea that God should be constantly watching over human lives. He thundered that the biblical God was nothing more than a celestial dictator. Get rid of him, and live free.

The secularists have offered lovingly painted word pictures of a future without religion, which often have the character of a Utopia in which humanity lives out an endless college experience of learning, engaging in creative pursuits like playing music, and having polite and reasoned interactions with people of other ethnicity and cultures. Scientific solutions could be found to the problem of crime. And soon society would flourish with high-tech answers to all of society’s deepest conundrums. They have argued that without God, human beings would finally be able to proximate to their full potential and nobility. People would be no longer bound in the mental prison of superstition. To paraphrase Stalin, life would be better; life would be happier, with more resources for the material needs of the people instead of the wastage of religion.

In the light of the effects of militant atheism in the Soviet Union and other regimes, such claims practically constitute an article of faith in their own right, if not a new and horrible form of delusion. Still, such a sentiment – and that is all it is, for it is neither rooted in historical nor present reality – is widespread in this age of declining faith.

Yet, for all of the hubris and confidence of the New Atheism, Voltaire’s dicta is finding an almost poetic fulfilment in the modern world. Societies are discovering that the best means of regulating human behaviour is through widespread surveillance, and this is being provided by the technology of mass observation and, more recently, the algorithms to judge human activity. Since most people no longer believe themselves accountable to God, and those who do seldom take their accountability seriously, it is necessary to fill the vacuum with a surveillance system that has some of the characteristics of deity. It is necessary to invent God, although since it is the work of human engineering, it is a cold, impersonal and ultimately merciless transposition.

CCTV cameras are nearly ubiquitous in the United Kingdom, with Londoners being watched by more cameras than virtually any other population in the world. The United Kingdom has embraced politically correct secularism with a degree of enthusiasm that exceeds anything found virtually anywhere else. The subsequent levels of criminality, entitlement, social discord, and crude behaviour have made Britain a true outlier even in Western Europe. This is made it necessary to convert the nation into a monitored state, worthy of the Big Brother regime one of Britain’s native authors dreamt about, not yet a full century ago.

There are 5.9 million CCTV cameras in the United Kingdom, or 1 for every 11 people. Moreover, in an effort to protect themselves from antisocial behaviour, home CCTV cameras are purchased in great numbers by private residents for monitoring their yards and streets. Predictably, this has led to new forms of conflict between neighbours. Some neighbourhoods bristle with cameras as warring neighbours seek to capture each other on film engaging in actionable offences. The volume of such material is staggering. There is now enough CCTV footage captured of neighbourhood disputes for entire TV shows to construct episodes largely around privately captured CCTV footage.

But technology is evolving beyond the old school cameras filming in isolation. A new technology, aptly named “Eye in the Sky” is being trialled in India. This programme uses floating cameras mounted on drones to monitor large crowds in festival settings. The programme will be capable of identifying fights, knife attacks and other altercations through the use of complex algorithms. It will then alert authorities who will be able to respond.

China is going even further in its pursuit of social excellence, by creating a “social credit system” that is not just meant to deter ne’er-do-wells from breaking the law but also exert positive pressure upon their citizen body to be virtuous. Within this system of massive interlinked databases, a person’s every action is monitored by a vast array of interconnected cameras, facial recognition software, online ID tracking and the tracking of personal activities like work and study.

A person’s actions are ascribed positive or negative points. Thus, jaywalking, losing a defamation lawsuit, or not working enough hours will lower a person’s social credit score, while benevolent acts like donating blood or volunteering in the community would boost the social credit score. Only people with a high enough score receive social rewards like foreign travel and access to other benefits.

The potential for governments to shape people’s behaviour and thinking through the means of such a vast apparatus is frightening. Governments – even in democratic countries – already exercise a high degree of control over people’s moral and behavioural comportment, but a social credit system would raise the degree of influence to near total control.

And yet, despite its implications for democracy and its totalitarian character, it is undeniably attractive in the sense that we instinctively recognise that social virtues are far too hit-and-miss in the modern world. In the West, at least, there are very few penalties for objectionable, anti-social behaviours. Whatever the popular view to the contrary, in Western countries people are seldom incarcerated and seldom fined, yet antisocial behaviour (loud music late at night, public urination, casual assaults) is on the increase for which there are few remedies. If the law exercises restraint in the West, it is only because of a residue of the majesty with which it was once invested. And of course, as Voltaire implied, if people think they can get away with something, they will do it.

If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him. It is a tragic irony that this statement should be fulfilled in the most concrete and material terms in the modern world. No doubt Voltaire pictured a collective of godless men inventing a spiritual deity in order to finally bring some order, inspiration, hope, and self-restraint to themselves. He probably did not imagine that humankind would literally turn to machines, computers, mathematical algorithms, and ranking indexes to make people accountable and virtuous. Such is the bitter fruit of godlessness.

Provocation

We live too much in time. We’re too earth bound. We see as other men see; we think as other men think. We invest our time as the world invests it. We're supposed to be a different breed of people.

I believe that the church of Jesus Christ needs a new revelation of the majesty of God. We’re all going to stand one day, can you imagine it- at the judgement seat of Christ to give an account for the deeds done in the body. This is the King of kings. He’s the Judge of judges, and it’s the Tribunal of tribunals. There’s no court of appeal after it. The verdict is final. -Leonard Ravenhill

LIBRARY

@ Reformers OnlineDr Martyn Lloyd-Jones' three part sermon on true happiness is published in a slender and readable volume. In these sermons, Dr Lloyd-Jones reveals the depth of his journey into the wisdom and heart of God through his word and the way in which God's word is always applicable to man's true need.

@AmazonA Chance to Die is a vibrant portrayal of Amy Carmichael, an Irish missionary and writer who spent fifty-three years in south India without furlough. There she became known as "Amma," or "mother," as she founded the Dohnavur Fellowship, a refuge for underprivileged children.

@Free Grace PressThis substantial volume provides a portrait of the life of Leonard Ravenhill, an English evangelist, pastor and preacher whose life is an example of a man truly driven by a deep appreciation of the greatness of eternity and the desire to be a true-hearted servant to his Lord.

@Barnes and Noble This 1994 classic is becoming somewhat harder to find more than 20 years on, but is an unforgettable read. Drawing from historic, timeless Christian convictions, Allison categorises heresies and shows that all modern heresies are not new. It is a short text, beautifully written, and edifying.